


Call to the Lonely Earth

by audreycritter



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Superman - All Media Types, Superman/Batman (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Gen, MRE consumption, bruce is a moonlight grump, bruce wayne and his 1095327 reasons for PTSD, but loss is discussed, candy as minor therapy, clark is a sunshine child, conversations in small spaces, death of superman compliant, ends on an upswing, even though it's a wreck, everythings a wreck set it all on fire, knightfall canon compliant, major character deaths are canon-compliant ones not new, men trying to be emo together, non-permanent major character death, post DITF, sharing a submarine space craft vessel, some of them are bad at it (hint: it's bruce), superbros, themes of poor coping mechanisms, tw: grief, tw: injury, tw: suicidal tendencies, world's finest bromance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 07:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14765549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: There was a lot he wanted to reach across and say, a lot he didn’t know if Clark would ever understand.There was a lot he didn’t think he wanted Clark to understand, because the world couldn’t afford to have the light in Superman snuffed out the way it had been in and around Bruce.I don’t know anymore how to wake up and want to be alive,he almost told Clark, anyway.But he didn’t.





	Call to the Lonely Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Canon compliant with DITF, Knightfall, and Death of Superman. It's all sort of mashed together, though, per usual canon timeline disaster where too many things happen at once. I have no idea what was going on with Hal Jordan at the time so because he gets a very brief mention, please just pretend he's okay and doing his GL thing. 
> 
> Title from Falling Up's "Voices."

On the first day the fracture was healing, tender skin trying to pull away from the sutures on the side of him opposite the break, he convinced himself Alfred was going to leave as soon as he could walk to the kitchen to get his own food.

He’d threatened as much in the past weeks and Bruce couldn’t find it in himself to blame him for the ultimatum that had rung through the room with the force of much louder words.

This wasn’t what the mission was supposed to be, putting petty crooks in the hospital and dragging himself to the makeshift one in his own home.

Bruce also couldn’t find it in himself to stop.

Alfred was grieving and he understood that. With some time and distance, he would likely even begin to heal. Bruce didn’t think the same was true for himself, and frankly, he didn’t want it to be. He accepted the inevitability of Alfred’s departure, knowing their opposing viewpoints would drive a wedge between them that other conflicts never had.

When Clark had stopped by that week— a rare visit those days, after Bruce had made it clear he wanted space, space, and more space around him like a mushrooming fallout cloud— he’d sat with him in the study and fiddled with a wooden puzzle from Bruce’s desk.

It was too much like the nervous energy of boys, working up their nerve to talk to him about something they knew he’d oppose, and he snarled at Clark to put it down.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself,” Clark finally said, very quietly, setting the puzzle down with a decisive click of wood against wood on the desk surface.

Bruce rubbed at the bruised skin above the fracture and growled, “Doing  _what_ , Clark?”

He wasn’t sure what he really wanted to say, looking across the six feet between him and a man he trusted with his life, and feeling the space like an endless chasm. Clark clearly didn’t know how to talk to him anymore and Bruce didn’t know how to hear his attempts.

There was a lot he felt he didn’t know.

There was a lot he wanted to reach across and say, a lot he didn’t know if Clark would ever understand.

There was a lot he didn’t think he wanted Clark to understand, because the world couldn’t afford to have the light in Superman snuffed out the way it had been in and around Bruce.

 _I don’t know anymore how to wake up and want to be alive_ , he almost told Clark, anyway.

But he didn’t.

Almost saying it was progress, he thought. It was more than he’d wanted a month ago. He wanted to keep Clark free of the debris field that was his existence now, but he also wanted to tell him  _keep stopping by, maybe someday I can reach you again, maybe someday soon I’ll want to try._

Clark, to his credit, because he was Clark and because he was Superman, was still trying. Maybe because even when Bruce wanted space, space was in some way Clark’s natural habitat. It didn’t threaten him the way it did others. Bruce couldn’t think of any other explanation for his visits, even if they were rare. He didn’t leave after being rebuffed, either. They spent another hour in silence that gradually eased into something almost comfortable, the ghost of a familiar companionship. Bruce felt tension he hadn’t noticed leaving his neck, gone in the same instant he found that it had been there all along.

Soon, the fracture would heal and he wouldn’t need the crutches; he wouldn’t need to pause halfway up the steps to catch his breath. Then, Alfred would go on his way and Bruce would go on the way he was until he wasn’t.

It was hard to imagine any other end, now.

When Clark did stand to leave, Bruce had the wild impulse to thank him, to apologize, to ask him to one day apologize to Dick, to keep an eye on him. Even if Dick didn’t like him much right now, he’d always at least liked Clark.

Bruce said nothing.

Clark left the room and then a week after that, Clark left the world.

Alfred stayed at the Manor, after all, and Bruce stayed home from the funeral, and withered with the shame of it. He’d once prided himself on his strength, hardwon as it was, but he knew he didn’t have it in him to watch someone else be put in the ground.

Jason had been too much.

Something in the world turned dark, then, even when the sun shone. It had been gray for months, washed out no matter the weather, and now it was black from daybreak to day’s end and all through each long and bloodied night.

When Bane showed up, he didn’t seem out of place. He was all the things that the earth was now: merciless, poisoned, enraged.

The scariest part of waking and not being able to feel his legs, of swimming through the haze of pain medication to feel the pins and rods holding his spine together, was the understanding that he was left behind in a body that was no longer a liar, and he was finally as broken outside as inside, but still breathing.

* * *

If he’d spent the past months constructing a prison of violence and solitude, then what Bane sentenced him to was pain and constant company. Eventually, they said, he could be alone again, but in the first weeks after he was dumped in the gutters, he was never truly by himself.

He crawled back to awareness, only to find that there was always a nurse, a doctor, an orderly, a therapist, or Alfred nearby. Whenever they left a room, it only started a short countdown to a return.

Bruce, accustomed to long hours with no real company, chafed at the loss of agency.

He was  _fragile_ , the medical equivalent of a flight risk with a passport for the afterlife. He warranted constant watching, so those who cared to keep him alive could insure he was breathing, eating, sleeping, moving with a normal temperature. While he’d lost all sensation in his lower half, his upper body had not yet adjusted to the trauma and he was always tired, always steeped in exhaustion down into his bones.

Gradually, partly out of annoyance, he became one of those people who cared to keep him alive, because putting effort into healing was one step closer to uninterrupted silence again.

He craved it, like he’d never craved anything— all turmoil and misery beyond what existed in the most present moment vanished in the wanting. Later, he could add those back in, when he was alone enough to do so.

The day, as he wanted it, never came.

The first time Alfred, very reluctantly, left him on his own in the manor for the few hours before the arrival of his therapist for the day, the panic was as vivid as if he’d dosed himself with fear toxin.

Rather than the balm he had looked for, the silence was torture. He couldn’t go five minutes without thinking of another way he could be immobilized, attacked, or simply rendered helpless by accident and beyond the reach of the cell phone that was his lifeline.

He stared out a living room window, hands white knuckled on the cold wheels of the chair, the brakes set, and sweated. It was a crucible burning away every pretense that he’d been working as hard as he could, or that he didn’t want to try anymore. Even more than when his back had been broken, he felt the sharp sting of certainty that Jason— Clark, too— would have been disappointed in him.

Dick and Tim were. Barbara was. It wasn’t until that afternoon, desperate for the company of everyone he’d shoved and shoved and shoved away, that he understood it wasn’t because of Bane’s actions but his own response.

Bruce, for the first time in what felt like ages, found himself caring. He cared about the future, now that it wasn’t anything like what he’d expected.

For the first time since Jason died, Bruce’s picture of the future didn’t include his own tomb.

The therapist arrived. Bruce threw himself into things with a fervor reminiscent of early training. Alfred came back from running errands, Bruce prodded at the odd sensation of having desires again, and then they left for London.

He left Gotham and the ghosts behind, until he could come back to face them.

* * *

The issue with the social construct of time was that it felt like a lifetime and not merely six months before Bruce was back in Gotham as the Batman.

He returned and so did Clark, a bright flash of miracle across the dawning sky.

Bruce, just salvaging the professional relationships he’d had before, before, before, honestly didn’t see much of him those first weeks. Clark had his parents, and Lois, and the League, plus saving the world a half dozen times and tearing red bolts across the sky to remind everyone he was back.

Of course, he stopped by— it was Clark, after all— but it was brief and later muddled in Bruce’s memory from the sheer intensity of internal emotion he wouldn’t admit to. He met him on his feet, felt tender tendrils of renewed hope unfurl as if greeting the sun itself. He didn’t mention his back, or the fact that he’d been out of the Cave almost as long as Clark had, and it didn’t take much effort to be slightly more pleasant than he’d been before, before, before.

Clark wasn’t rushing at all until he was, his full and warm attention on Bruce and then his sharp and concerned attention somewhere else, beyond Bruce’s own hearing, and with a small murmur of apology he was gone.

The whole world had missed him and the whole world needed him. On the other hand, Gotham needed Bruce. They were both men who met the needs that called to them, and so days and weeks went by in the faster-speeding current of hours until Clark’s return became a fact in the world and not the center of it.

Mornings felt like mornings again, but Bruce’s nights were still long. After months of personal pain and a world shrunk to therapy rooms, he was in the thick of ugly crime again, spiraling beyond his control. He’d wake at night from dreams that followed him like slithering snakes, of his boy not dead, or Barry returned, or Clark dead again.

He’d pull the cowl back on and go visit headstones in the pre-dawn chill, text Clark about a news story or case file just to wait for the reply. While waiting, he’d let the dread pool in his stomach that he was a fool, a madman, a phantasm conned by phantasms— and he’d curse the graveyard, the still-dead bodies there, and himself.

It was unfair, or he was selfish.

It was both.

The reply would come, lighting up his phone screen and the shroud inside him. He’d go back to the Manor with a sprig of hope, now that they lived in a world where  _what if_  had become  _what is_. But hope was dangerous, prone to turn corrosive, and he never could let it harbor long.

But, he thought, it was enough.

It wasn’t until a League mission that either he or Clark slowed down to see each other, and even that was accidental.

They’d had a three minute window.

The mission to an alien world was exploratory, and Bruce had gone because he wanted to manage data and sample collection himself. A Lantern was supposed to go with him, and a Lantern didn’t show— Clark was at the Tower and Bruce had a three minute window to get his craft below the surface of a frozen ocean on a frozen world.

Clark didn’t hesitate to volunteer.

Bruce didn’t have time to argue for the sake of arguing.

They had a shift in the atmosphere’s storm system, a brief break to slip down through cracks in the ancient glaciers and down, down, down until there were eleven miles of frigid water above them.

There were thirteen hours for the external arm of the craft to gather samples from the underwater cliff face, before the storm would move again and they could escape. Clark, technically, could escape at any time— but going outside of the craft would depressurize the entire thing and leave Bruce dead within seconds, crushed by the pressure of thousands of feet of alien water.

Thirteen hours with minute-long tasks every thirty or so made for a lot of time to fill. Bruce hadn’t especially been looking forward to it with a Lantern for company, but it was Clark instead and somehow that seemed bearable. Preferable, even, to solitude.

If only he could know Clark wouldn’t try to  _talk_.

Clark not talking lasted less time than it would have taken a pot of coffee to brew.

“What happened to your back?”

Bruce pointedly did not stop updating a written log or look up.

“The usual,” he said, flatly.

“That doesn’t look like the usual,” Clark said, hovering a few inches from the sub floor. His cape hung straight down without a breeze to ruffle it. His arms were crossed; Bruce could make that much out in his peripheral.

“Drop it. It’s nothing,” Bruce growled.

“What? It’s not nothing. I missed six months. I want to know what I missed. We haven’t gotten to talk much.” Clark prodded, his voice neutral. Casual, even. Meanwhile, Bruce could feel panicky pricks rising up on his neck, his arms. It took effort to keep his hands from shaking while he filled the log book with neat, slanted script. He wished he’d left his gloves on.

It wasn’t talking about it.

It was remembering.

Bruce didn’t want to remember.

“You didn’t miss much,” Bruce snarled, slamming the book shut.

“Except whatever made you need screws and…” Clark squinted. “Two? Two rods in your spine.”

“What do you want me to do, Kal? Stroke your ego? Tell you how much I missed you, how much the world needed you? That if you hadn’t been six feet under maybe Bane wouldn’t have broken me like a child’s toy? That maybe I wouldn’t have wished he’d gone all the way and I’m still furious at him for leaving me in the street like trash instead of just ending it? Is that what you want to hear?”

Any semblance of keeping his hands still vanished while he was shouting, the words filling the sub more and more until they were reverberating in the 10 x 18 foot space. It would have made a normal person wince, but Clark didn’t react at all, except for a morose twist of his mouth and brow. He looked so sad that Bruce, chest heaving and cowl ripped off, couldn’t keep looking at him while the fury still burned his lungs. With a roar, he threw the cowl and it clattered across the floor and he knew the second it left his hand it was an impossibly foolish, impossibly childish thing to do, but he turned and sat down hard on the workbench stool and bent over the log again.

The log didn’t need updating. He began recording temperature data from a readout anyway.

Clark was blessedly silent, no word of reproof or sympathy.

An ugly, sour taste seeped into Bruce’s mouth. It was like black oil had been spilled into his gut, staining and poisoning and slipping tendrils into every part of him.

He was drenched in regret, twisted up with anger and internally fighting to justify himself and faltering in the face of Clark’s silence. When he risked a glance, Clark had already set his feet on the floor and was sitting several feet down the workbench writing in a notebook. Bruce didn’t remember hearing him move and it unsettled him, not knowing if it had been superspeed or if he’d been so distracted that he’d genuinely not heard.

Clark didn’t look like a whipped puppy slinking away after Bruce’s outburst, but he still looked upset. It was bordering on an angry scowl for him, which, ironically, was more reassuring to Bruce than outright hurt would have been. There was something safe in blunt dislike or fury, something more clear cut and distilled than sympathy or pity or hurt. It had glistening edges like knives, but at least it was easy to know what parts would cut you, what to keep your fingers away from.

The remorse won out, because he couldn’t fault Clark for being curious by nature and it was unfair to make him miserable while they were stuck together.

It still took another forty-seven minutes and an evaluation of the sample-gathering cycle to force himself to speak again, his lips and mouth and throat dry like grit while his palms sweated.

“Sorry,” he finally managed. “I shouldn’t have…”

He trailed off. He squared his shoulders while facing the desk and repeated himself, with a firmer ending to the tone.

“I shouldn’t have. I’m not good at this.”

Clark said nothing for about thirty seconds, then he leaned back with his arms crossed behind his head and reclined as easily as if he’d had a lounge chair propping him up. The anger had vanished almost immediately and there was something like amusement in his eyes, easy and kind. It was less comfortable than the anger, but then it was Bruce’s to swallow down like bitter medicine and not Clark’s burden to bear.

“Apology accepted.”

“Don’t be a pushover, Clark,” Bruce snipped, the barely settled unease stirring hot and uncomfortable again. He could have slammed his face against the desk for almost immediately undoing his one small effort, because this was the opposite of how he wanted to spend hours trapped with Clark— at odds, bickering. Or, fighting with a Clark who refused to fight back. It was humiliating and a waste of time, especially over something so trivial.

Clark, however, did not respond to this insult the way he’d responded to Bruce’s earlier foul outburst. He merely went to pick up the cowl and then set it on the work desk near Bruce.

“You know, I almost failed tenth grade? First quarter grades were all Ds, except for one F, and a B in gym that didn’t really count.”

The sub felt incredibly quiet, as if this were some sort of weighty admission instead of some brushed away detail from Clark’s youth. Bruce, unable to figure out where he was going, said nothing in encouragement or deflection.

“You know my Ma. She’d be disappointed, sure, maybe ground me. But I was scared to death of what Pa would say. I didn’t think he’d hurt me, I don’t think he could have at that point even if he’d tried. Either way, I didn’t think he would. But I was terrified anyway. I was sure he didn’t understand. I wanted to pay attention in class, but I was spending most of the day trying not to accidentally set something on fire with my eyes, or hold a pencil too tight. It was all I could think about, getting that under control.”

Bruce thought about Alfred’s expression the day he’d told him he dropped out of school— not that he was intending to, or wanted to, but that he already had dropped out a week before and had been wandering Gotham instead of going to class. Nothing in the world could have talked him out of that decision, out of the plane tickets in his jacket pocket, but Alfred’s quiet fury and visible distress had wounded him all the same. He’d braced himself for it and still gone away from that talk with a sucking hole in his heart.

Alfred had accused him of not caring about his future, but he’d still  _cared_  about some things.

Clark took Bruce’s continued silence as permission to go on.

“You know, I think he was mad? But Ma must’ve gotten to him first or something, because he didn’t show a bit of it to me. He told me I had the rest of the semester to change the grades, but there were different kinds of smart. I’d been working on another kind that year and he wasn’t going to give me grief for it.”

“You have good parents, Kal,” Bruce said softly, thinking about how he’d blown up when Dick dropped out of college. How Alfred had argued but  _hadn’t_  blown up at him years earlier, and Dick at least had something he wanted to be doing instead. Bruce couldn’t have labeled his desire or plans at the time, and again he was awash with regret.

He felt mean, like a rattlesnake striking at every person in his path for decades. It made him feel small on the workbench stool, and he turned from the desk surface to pull his legs up and draw his cape around him while he listened. Clark wouldn’t care, wouldn’t say anything, because he was Clark. Being irritated by that made him feel even smaller, even meaner.

“They are good parents,” Clark agreed, and then he stopped. He walked away and pulled out an MRE from a sub cabinet that he didn’t  _need_ , and began tearing packages while humming to himself.

Bruce, left perched with a dull throb in his spine, frowned.

The timer on the sample collection dinged and Bruce uncurled himself, drew it into the craft through the airlock, catalogued a few things, and reset all of it while Clark ate. He returned to the same position, chin resting on his knees, and watched Clark throw away an empty MRE tray.

“Want one?” Clark offered, catching his eye.

“What was the point of that,” Bruce asked bluntly, knowing Clark had meant something by the shared memory and frustrated at not being able to determine what.

“Of food?” Clark raised an eyebrow with a grin.

“Shut up,” Bruce grumbled. “Yes, I’ll take one. I can get it.”

“Hm,” Clark said, ignoring the second part and rifling through the MRE packets. “What do you want? We’ve got Salisbury steak, Salisbury steak, Salisbury steak, and beef stew.”

He glanced at Bruce with a question on his face, and Bruce answered without moving.

“Hal likes the Salisbury ones.”

“And you hate Hal,” Clark returned, taking a box and closing the cabinet. He tossed it and Bruce caught it one-handed, and set it behind him on the desk. He really wasn’t that hungry.

Clark picked up his notebook and then leaned back against the workbench beside Bruce. He tossed the notebook down and picked up the MRE and began to open it.

With a growl, Bruce snatched it from him and took over. Clark let him take it, and Bruce began eating while it tasted like ashes in his mouth, while his back ached in a way that had quickly become familiar. It was a scar in his expectations, his constant being, the ragged groove of something that was merely a fact of his physical self.

“The point is that my Pa was right and I’ve never forgotten it.”

“To not punish you for going through an experience no one on earth could have possibly walked you through?” Bruce chewed and wondered if he could convince Alfred to attempt imitation MREs.

“Think about it this way,” Clark said, taking the packet of crackers when Bruce set them aside with a lip curl of disgust. He put a small bag of M&Ms in the place the crackers vacated in Bruce’s neat spread across the box on his knees, and shrugged at Bruce’s raised eyebrow. “What? You like them. I don’t. I saved them for you.”

“Because you’re an  _idiot_  with no taste,” Bruce said. More quietly, with less venom, he added: “Thank you.”

Clark shrugged again. “If I put you— well, not me, but somebody— in a hostage situation in a flooding room without your utility belt and a dozen civilians, you’d get them all out alive. I don’t know how you’d do it, but you would. Because you’re you.”

“Hn,” Bruce said.

“I bet you those civilians—”

“The hypothetical civilians.”

“Yes. The hypothetical civilians probably all did things that normal people do, like telling their kids they loved them and meeting their friends for coffee and talking about their problems.”

Bruce tensed. Clark went on, even though he must have noticed. His tone didn’t change.

“Would you blame any of those hypothetical civilians for not getting themselves or others out safely?”

“Of course not,” Bruce said slowly, with the distinct impression he was walking into a trap. “Even assuming any of them had military or hostage situation training, to be ambushed without warning and without gear would render most training useless.”

“Right,” Clark said. He took a second to finish off a cracker he’d been holding. “But you’d get them out. In fact, you’d be upset with yourself if you didn’t. But you probably didn’t tell Dick you loved him that morning. Doubt you said it to Alfred either.”

Bruce was no longer tense. He was as stiff and motionless as granite, and feeling just as hard inside.

“Kal,” he said, warning.

“The point is, you expect so much of yourself it makes it easy for others to do the same,” Clark said gently. “Even me, sometimes. But if you’re the kind of man who can do things I don’t expect of any other man, like saving lives if you just happen to be in the room, when nobody else could pull it off, then maybe it’s not fair to expect you to be good at everything. You’re so good at so damn much, Bruce, it’s tempting to be as hard on you as you are.”

“I…” Bruce felt the protest, the question, the rebuttal slip away from him because he didn’t even know what he would have said. He wanted to argue but he didn’t know where to begin, how to piece out the places Clark was wrong and the places where Clark was so right it stung him.

“I knew you weren’t going to handle it well when I asked,” Clark said. “I asked anyway because I thought it was important that I find out from you, and not some technical report. I’d still like to. But I’m not going to hold it against you if you aren’t good at just telling me.”

The punch of that was packed with all the ache of knowing he’d had that kind of trust and acceptance, if unstated, with Clark before, before, before, and then it had been ripped away and he’d had to live without it. Even if Clark hadn’t and wouldn’t understand what it was like to live without Jason, how it hurt every goddamn second, he had known once that Clark would be there anyway while Bruce figured it out and tore the world to pieces while he tried.

On days when when he didn’t  _want_  to try.

Then that had been gone, too, and he still remembered the taste of his own blood in his mouth while his ears roared with the pain of a broken body and he had one, terrifying, solid emotion in the midst of all that chaos: rage that Bane hadn’t finished it.

He didn’t feel like that all the time, or even most of the time, anymore.

The tears standing in his eyes made it impossible to look up and over his shoulder at Clark. He stared at the floor instead, knowing even part of his face would betray him completely. Clark’s hand landed firmly on his shoulder.

“So. What happened to your back?”

Whatever was left of the MRE tumbled to the floor when Bruce stood, faster than most people could move but not nearly too fast for Clark to follow. He twisted, ignoring the twinge in his back, and hauled Clark into a hug.

The arms that wrapped around him in response didn’t hesitate and for a moment, Bruce just stood with his head on Clark’s shoulder, breathing in the smell of sunshine and hope and all the things that shouldn’t have smells and he’d once thought he’d never grasp again. There were so many things wrong with the world that he thought if he lost it again, it would be the end of him, he’d drown without the warmth packed into the embrace.

“I missed you,” he said roughly.

Clark’s arms tightened just slightly around him and then relaxed again. “I know,” he said, his breath like an afternoon field across Bruce’s ear. “I’m sorry.”

Bruce pulled away and wouldn’t look at Clark’s face. He bent to pick the scattered MRE components, and blinked, and it was already all in a neat pile in Clark’s hand. Bruce took just the M&Ms and cleared the desk with a sweep of his arm, pushing everything to the side. He sat on the desk with his aching back against the sub craft wall and Clark sat next to him. One benefit of designing the craft was that he knew the workbench would hold them.

“Bane fractured three vertebrae and damaged my spinal cord,” Bruce said, eyes closed. He shook the M&Ms into his mouth. “I was paralyzed from the waist down for a few months. I left the cowl, Gotham, all of it.”

“Hell,” Clark breathed, crossing his arms as he listened. “Sorry. Go on.”

Bruce told him— about Bane and Arkham, Kinsolving and Azrael, about his own coming back. Clark occasionally asked questions and Bruce occasionally snapped his answers.

Clark didn’t leave.

“I wanted to die,” Bruce said, in little more than a whisper, near the end. “Alfred said I had a death wish and he wasn’t wrong.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Clark said vehemently. “What if I’d come back and you’d been gone? Hell, Bruce. I don’t…”

He put a hand to his brow and then dragged it down his face.

“I’m just glad you’re alive, that’s all.”

Their eyes met and Bruce knew he was bad at this, Clark knew him well enough to be completely right about that. He hoped he conveyed how much he understood about how it was hell to lose someone, about how for the first time in over a year he was starting to agree that it was good he wasn’t dead. He didn’t quite understand why he was  _that_  to Clark, how he could possibly be that important to Kal of all beings. He’d just have to accept not understanding, maybe.

“So am I,” he said, looking straight at him. “I’m glad you are, too.”


End file.
